Stuff You Should Know - Why Landmines Are The Deadliest Legacy Of War

Episode Date: April 10, 2018

One of the worst legacies of war are the millions of landmines left behind. They hide for decades after a conflict is over, exploding beneath unsuspecting civilians and children. To many, removing mines and banning new ones is of paramount importance. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Rowland.

Back together again at last, just like last week. Yeah, that's what I was about to say. What are you talking about? You know what I'm talking about, Willis. What you're talking about? Oh, that was a pretty good one. Subtle, understated. So Chuck, how are you feeling today?

I'm kind of tired of this weather. Yeah, it's pretty nasty, huh? Yeah, I mean, it's almost April in Atlanta, and it's still cold at night. It's... And during the day, for that matter. It usually, the way that Atlanta is for those who don't know, it'll be cold, cold, cold,

like really cold down in the freezing. Sometimes it'll snow, and then it'll start to warm up. And then at the end of February, boom, one more snow out of nowhere, and then spring. That's not how it's going this time. No. No. And it's been real gloomy and dismal, huh?

Yeah, I got the sads. It's okay, it'll clear up soon enough. Easter's on its way. Peter Rabbit's gonna bring us some sunshine and springtime. Good, and poison eggs. Poison eggs? No, you're thinking of Halloween candy. Oh, right.

So today, Chuck, we're not talking about Halloween or Easter or even the weather. We're talking about something that has become kind of an international global issue, rightfully so, in the best way possible, because in this case, the international community, the global community has kind of come together to try to alleviate a really overlooked problem,

literally and figuratively overlooked problem, landmines. Yeah, and has been, this isn't like a brand new effort. No. But it's a little daunting to say the least and depressing. It is. There's something like, I saw, there's all these really, like you said, depressing statistics all over the place when you look into landmines.

Fortunately, although they are daunting, they're not so daunting that people are just like, forget it, we're not even gonna do this. But I saw something like, it would take 1100 years at the current pace of progress to remove all the landmines on earth right now that are buried on earth, if not another single one is laid.

Yeah, well, part of the problem though, was the number of they're laying landmines 25 times faster. Yes. Gathering up old landmines? Yes. Yeah, that's the issue. Yeah, it's something like, I saw between two and a half million

and five million landmines are laid every year, new ones. And more than 100 million in over 70 countries around the world. Yeah, that's a lot. In places where there's no war or conflict going on any longer, that's the big problem with landmines. Well, there's a couple of problems.

One, they're indiscriminate. They don't recognize whether you're a civilian or a soldier. Yeah. They stick around long after the conflict is over and they still manage to kill and maim thousands of people every year around the world. And apparently it's on an upswing

thanks to the conflicts in Yemen and Syria and some of the work of ISIS as well. Just so depressing. It really is. Like there's nothing that really more that kind of embodies like just the mute, killing, maiming aspect of war than a landmine. It's just a dumb lump of explosive that you step on

and it blows you up, you know what I mean? Yeah, and especially the years later effect, which is maybe there hasn't been war for two decades. And a little kid can still come along and say, oh, what's this thing? And then they don't have legs. Yeah, and the kid's thing is real. So apparently landmines kill,

disproportionately kill civilians way more than soldiers because of their ability to be left over after a war. And the most recent statistics from 2016, the majority of the civilians killed were children. Yeah. I was actually, I was talking to Yumi about it. She grew up on Okinawa and there's a lot of World War II unexploded ordinance around there.

And she was telling me that they used to watch like educational films saying like, if you see something metal in the woods, stay away, go tell an adult. Yeah, I'm sure. That was like the movies they were taught, you know? Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, when you're raised in an area where,

and we're talking about landmines specifically, but in a lot of cases, they're just unexploded bombs and things like that too. Yeah, I know like they find something like 100 tons of it in Belgium alone every year. Most of it from World War I still. Wow. So, but we are talking specifically about landmines,

which seemed to kind of bear the focus of the international efforts to get rid of them because they are probably the biggest problem of unexploded ordinance today. Yeah. Well, should we go back in time here and talk about the history? Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, this one was interesting because I don't think a lot of people when they hear about landmines know that they started in like legit started during the American Civil War. No, I thought World War II at the earliest. Yeah, so in the American Civil War, they were called torpedoes or subterracelles. There was a man, a North Carolinian named Gabriel Reigns,

who initially fought for the union, but then said, wait a minute, I'm from North Carolina. I'm not actually sure how that switch happened. He's like, North Carolina's with the South, ay-ay-ay. But he was the first person to sort of play around with these and eventually get a patent called the Reigns patent on what essentially was a very sort of early crude, but effective landmine.

Yeah, and so this is at a time when like pitched battles are still the norm. Sure. Your infantry meets my infantry in a field and like you do a bunch of shooting and then we do a bunch of shooting and then there's advancement in retreats and cannons and stuff like that.

Is it our turn to shoot or their turn? I forgot. I mean, pretty much, right? And there's people like picnicking, watching the battle. Like that's how staged they were. And the Confederacy didn't necessarily play by those rules. They did in many battles for sure, but they also definitely had a gorilla facet to them

as well. And this definitely screams guerrilla warfare because the Union army was taken totally off guard by the early landmines that they encountered. Yeah, and it was not something that was readily accepted into warfare. The generals were, well, everyone was scared first of all once they got wind of what these things were.

They're all of a sudden like, what? Like I can, like we're literally just walking through the woods and now we can just die with no enemy nearby. And apparently Gabriel Reigns himself was one of the first to lay a bunch of these from the road to Richmond after the defeat of a battle. And that's when the Union army first encountered

these things. Well, yeah, so not only were they scared, but then the hierarchy, the generals were pretty ticked off. They were like, this is, one of the quotes is, the rebels have been guilty of the most murderous and barbarous conduct. So they were not welcomed into warfare. They thought it was sort of a cheap trick

and a dirty rotten thing to do. Yeah, and like you said, it scared the troops. It upset the generals. And these were not just like landmines like we think of them now. They were like booby trapped. Like they put them in flower sacs. So when you reached into a flower sac, boom, that blew up.

They put them around, like if the Confederates abandoned like an outpost, they would put them around the well, around the water, like places they knew the Union troops were gonna go. And you could either set them off by stepping on them, like a modern landmine, or they would attach things like tools to them with like a string.

So you would bend down and pick up the tool and set off this landmine that was buried nearby. And at first the Confederates too, some of the Confederate higher ups are like, I don't know if this is okay. Even in a civil war, and we're the Confederacy, we're in some ways a guerrilla army. I'm not sure we should be using these.

And then finally after a while, they're like, okay, we kind of need every tool we can get in the toolbox. And they acquiesced and started using them. And they spread them all over the South apparently. Yeah, and they don't have any figures on the soldiers that were killed, but they do know that total between the Union and the Confederates, 35, well, actually that's not true.

35 Union ships went down, one Confederacy ship went down. Which I'm taking was an accident. I don't know, maybe. Maybe, yeah. But remarkably, it says here in this article, you said that they found them, they were still finding them in the 1960s in Alabama.

Yeah, which makes you wonder, like how many are there still out there like around Atlanta, you know? I don't know. I mean, surely none, right? Well, you would hope also that after this time, the explosives would have decayed enough after being exposed to the weather for this long.

One of the articles that we use said that land mines, modern land mines, have a useful life of over 50 years. Surely by now, whatever they had attached to the Confederate land mines are no longer useful, even if you did find them in the woods. I would think so. Which is not to say you should do like a belly flop on it

to test it out. If you find something that even vaguely resembles a land mine in the woods of the southeastern United States, run and tell somebody. Yeah, that is the worst way to test out whether or not a land mine is still capable of working. Agreed. Is the belly flop method.

Yeah. So the Civil War is where they got their start. And they came into use pretty quickly after they were invented. But it was World War I and then really World War II, where they really came into focus. And our article from How Stuff Works says that the land mines for World War I and II were invented

to prevent people from picking up the land mines that were originally invented to blow up tanks. Yeah, I mean, there were a certain, they realized that there were a few uses. They could either lay a minefield to keep a group of troops and or tanks from going to a certain place. And sometimes it was to reroute a group of people

and tanks to a different area. Cause they're like, oh, well, we know that's a minefield. So we got to go this way, which might play right into the plans of the opposition. And then sometimes it's just to slow everybody down until they can get reinforcements. Right. So I mean, there is a use for this besides

just blowing somebody up. There's a larger strategic use for them. I hadn't really thought about it. I always thought it was just, you know, a nasty way of blowing somebody up by chance, you know? But it really does send a message too, which is don't keep going straight. You're gonna have to go one way or another

because obviously this place is mine. And really there's only one way to find out whether a place is mine too, especially during warfare. Like it's not like the enemy posts a sign that says we've mined this field suckers. Like you find out because one of them goes off either on a tank or one of your soldiers, you know? Well, yeah, and if one of them goes off it's there,

I don't think they were using like random rogue land mines. It was more likely a minefield. Right. So World War II is where they really kind of came into play. And one of the things I saw is that one of, so I guess by the numbers, the most mined place in the world as far as countries go is Egypt.

Oh, really? I was like, what? I mean, by a long shot, Egypt has something like, I think 230 million, no, sorry, 23 million mines unexploded around Egypt. Egypt's not that big, right? Holy cow. I think they have like 60 per square kilometer,

square mile, something like that. So they've got 23 million mines. And I was like, why Egypt? And it was the Nazis during the North African theater fighting in World War II, the Nazis mined all over around there, but apparently Egypt got the brunt of it. And there's still 23 million unexploded mines, they estimate in Egypt from World War II.

Should we take a break? Yeah, let's. All right, we'll take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk about the two main types of land mines that we're gonna cover today. Right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Alright, alright, alright, alright, alright. So, for all the purposes of this, and you know, there are more than 350 types of minds. So that would be exhaustive to go through all those, but the way our article breaks it down, which makes sense to me, or...

And the two main groups, which are Antipersonal Minds and Anti-Tank Minds. They both do about the same thing, which is explode after pressure is put on them. But in the cases of a tank, of course, they're going to be bigger with more boom and require more weight in order to make it go boom. Right. More pressure. Yeah.

So the anti-personnel mines, those are much lighter, much smaller, much cheaper, and I think found in much greater abundance around the world. For sure. There's one that this article covers called the M14 blast mine. And we should say there's actually a few different types of mines, especially as far as anti-personnel mines go, right? Yeah. So there's this, the standard blast mine, which is you step on it, it goes boom,

and bad things happen to you as a result. There's the bounding mine or bouncing mine. Basically, it means the same thing where you step on the mine, a fuses lit that ignites a propeller charge, which shoots the mine upward from under the ground, just barely covered over by the ground, up to about chest or head height, which then the mine explodes. Yeah. So it's designed to do even worse damage.

Yeah, those are called bouncing beddies or German S mines, either for spring or shrapnel. And I think I've seen those in movies before. That stuff is just nuts, man. You step on something and all of a sudden it bounces up in the air to about your chest. And makes a horrible whizzing sound too, if I remember correctly. Yeah. I mean, talk about just sheer intimidation factor too. Sure.

So the bouncing mine or the bounding mine is meant clearly to kill. The blast mine is meant to maim. It may not kill you, although you could die of your injuries later on, from an infection or something like that. Or you could bleed out if it got enough of your femoral artery. You would be in big trouble there. But it's designed mainly just to maim you, take you out of commission. The bounding mine is meant to blow you up and kill you.

Then there's a fragmentation mine. That's the third type of antipersonnel mine. And I mean, for those of you out here, you can't see me and Chuck, but our fingers are kind of digging into the table top right now. It's all unnerving. This is just so grim and gruesome. We're not even talking about shooting somebody. It's talking about these things designed to blow somebody up or blow their leg off.

Yeah, and I think what's most disconcerting about like a minefield of blast mines is the purpose to lay a minefield of blast mines is to almost certainly reroute somebody or to keep somebody from going somewhere. So it's not like they're saying, we're going to put down 300 mines here because we want to blow off 300 feet of soldiers. They just have to scatter them. So a couple of people get their feet blown off and they go, holy cow, we're in a minefield.

We got to go a different direction. But the residual effect is there's still 298 of those things out there. It's like a numbers game. So it's like the lowest common denominator of strategy almost. Yeah, but it's effective, which is why they keep using them. And I think also like if the army that was retreating laying those mines in their wake, if they got 300 feet blown off, they'd be fine with that. Even though like you say, that's not the ultimate aim of it.

It's to redirect people or to stall them until reinforcements can come for you. Well, yeah, and you don't keep going. Like after it happens a couple of times or maybe even once, you don't think, well, let's just press on and see what happens. Right. Maybe that was a fluke. It was a geothermal spring. Right.

And you talked about someone's foot being blown off. Supposedly the nickname for the M14 blast mine, which we'll talk about in a second, those are called toe poppers, which kind of undersells it to me, I think. Yeah. So the last one, the last type of anti-personnel mine is a fragmentation mine. And that's meant to get a bunch of guys all at once all around you. And it may not take off their leg.

It won't kill anybody, but it's certainly going to slow down several soldiers at once because these blow up and they shoot fragments everywhere. Yeah. Like a pretty long way. Right. So the Claymore Mine is an example of a fragmentation grenade or a fragmentation mine. And then so too are cluster mines, which kind of fall into a different category because they're dropped out of bombs, typically dropped from aircraft.

They fall out of cylinders, hundreds of them. And then when they hit the ground, they blow up and shoot hundreds of fragments. So each of those hundreds of small mines shoots out hundreds of fragments. The reason they become de facto land mines is because not all of them blow up. And so they can be found later and then blow up when they're being handled by a kid or a curious civilian or something. Playmore with Claymore. Remember that from the Simpsons?

No. I think it was a long time ago, but I think that was like a poster in the shop of like an Army Navy store or something. The guy missing an arm. Oh, maybe so. Yeah. I remember. That was like one of the first season ones, I'll bet.

It was old for sure. I forgot about him. Oh, and by the way, our buddy Kevin Pollack just guested on the Simpsons after that many years. I would have thought he would have been on by now, but he did it like two or three voices this past week. I did not know that. I'm glad to see that one. Yeah, it was good. How did he do?

Did he crack under pressure? Yeah. He did a great job. I'm sure he did. All right. So the M14 is, these are small. Like it fits in the palm of your hand. It's about an inch and a half, 1.6 inches tall and about 2.2 inches in diameter.

And we developed this here in the US in the 1950s and it has been sort of a go-to around the world since then. This one is not a very big boom, but it does cause damage with these little silver BBs that it shoots out. That's the toe popper one. Yeah. So, oh, it does have BBs that it shoots out. I thought it was just a straight up blast mine. Oh, I thought this one had BBs. Maybe not.

I don't know. I know that this, I don't know, possibly it could be modified, but it is small and it looks like a mean little hockey puck, basically. Yeah, the meanest. And one of the things that you're going to find in mines throughout the world is something that's called a Belleville spring. And it's basically like a washer that you put on, well, a bolt. You know, what else are you going to put a washer on your weirdo? So it's a washer, but it's kind of popped upward on one side. So the Belleville spring holds up the firing pin.

But when you put enough pressure on it and you overcome the pressure, the upward pressure being exerted by the Belleville spring, it kind of pops downward. And when it does that, it taps that firing pin, which shoots down into the detonator. It's really cheap, really easy to use and really effective. And it's found through in mines of all different types and varieties. It's usually the thing holding everything in place. And then that's what pressure overcomes is a Belleville spring. And they're found in the M14 mines as well. Yeah, it's sort of like like the hand grenade.

It's not a very sophisticated piece of gear. It's very kind of rudimentary. And on all of them, there's some sort of safety clip just like a grenade. You remove the clip and usually there's some sort of switch that either says, I mean, it doesn't say this, but basically it says either boom or no boom. And you switch it to boom and set it down and walk away. Yeah, backwards, I assume. Yeah, slowly. And yeah, you cover it up maybe with some leaves, a little bit of dirt just enough so that it can't be seen, but not enough that you would dampen the blast at all or make it so that any of the pressure is dampen.

And all it takes is like 20 pounds or nine kilograms of pressure from say somebody stepping on it. And that sets off the, I think it's got something like how many grams of tetral in it? 31 grams in the M14. So again, that's not very much, but it's enough that you will say lose your foot or if you're stepping directly on it, you may lose part of your leg. Not necessarily right then, but you may have to have it amputated later on, which makes it even nastier. I understand the point of this. It's like there's one soldier who's not fighting anymore. He's over there sapping the healthcare resources of the medical corps.

But I mean, that's a lifelong injury. That's a nasty thing to put down as a $3 weapon that's just left behind under the dirt by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the millions apparently every year. Yeah, I imagine that setting these is a little unnerving too. Like I know that technically, even for these small ones, it takes however many pounds of pressure, but it's still probably a little bit unnerving when you flip that thing to on and scoop a little dirt on top of it. Yeah. I mean, you don't want to like throw a dirt chunk on it or anything like that. Yeah. Or what about being the guy who drives the truck that has crates full of those things in the back? Yeah. You're just hoping that all of them have the safety in. Yeah.

So that's the M14. That's the one that's probably the most common throughout the world, mostly because it's the cheapest. Like I said, it costs about $3 US to make one of those things. Although supposedly it costs about $1,000 to remove one. Man, not while that's part of the problem too. Yeah, for sure. So the M16 is another kind. This is one of the bounding fragmentation mines that we're talking about that pop up from the ground. And that has three main components, the mine fuse, propelling charge to lift it out, like you said, and then this cast iron housing. And it is bigger. It's about almost eight inches tall and about five inches in diameter.

And it has about a little over one pounds of TNT inside. So that's quite a bit of boom going on. Yes. And again, when you either step on the thing and you overcome the upward pressure from the Belleville spring, or I think these things can also be booby trapped. So like a wire can be attached to the firing pin. Either way, the firing pin shoots down, ignites that percussion cap, which sends the thing upward. And then a second detonator that's been on a delay fuse explodes once it reaches about three feet or a meter into the air. Yeah, I think one of the scariest parts of this one too is, at least in the movies, there's like that split second.

Where you're a soldier and you see that thing pop up in the air and you know what's coming. Right. Yeah, with a regular old blast mine, it's like step boom. You probably don't have much of a chance to register that you just stepped on something. No. Whereas, yeah, that fragmentation mine. And again, like the sound that it makes is just horrifically unnerving. I should say at least from the movies. Yeah, when movies are always right.

Yeah. Speaking of movies though, like in The Hurt Locker, I know, and I've seen in other movies, like I think generally step on it. And once that pressure is released is when the boom happens. So I remember episodes of maybe MASH and other like war movies I've seen. There have been like soldiers would step on one and hear the click and then be like, well, I've got to stand on this thing now until we figure it out. Right. And it was under that impression too, but nowhere in my research did I find that to be the case. Oh, really?

Yeah. For me, everything I saw was once you step on it and that pressure overcomes the Belleville Spring, the firing pin is shot downward into the detonation cap. And then once that happens or the detonator, I should say, once that happens, the whole thing explodes. There's not like a once you lift up, then the pressure or the firing pin has dropped. My guess is that they did not completely create that out of whole cloth and out of the 350 types of land mines that some of them probably do that. Yeah. You're probably right. I'm just saying I didn't run across any that had that.

And I noticed that as well. So next up we have the tank mines that we were talking about with the arrival of tanks basically is when we started getting these anti-tank mines. And they're much, much larger and they require at least like 300 plus pounds of pressure. So unless you're a big boy soldier, then you're not going to detonate them by stepping on them. It's still probably, again, I don't think you would give that a try and say only way to 75. Let me see what happens. Yeah. But those are built to disable a tank.

Sometimes they can have so much boom that it can kill people around it, but generally it's to blow the tracks off of the tank. Right. And yeah, and so once the tank is disabled, that's a big win. That's a win. Yeah, that's a big win. So again, they started making those from what I can understand as far as World War One goes, they made those first and then they made the anti-personnel ones to keep people from just going up and picking up the mines and removing them. Yeah. So like they'll surround an anti-tank mine with several anti-personnel mines.

Right. And you said it has a big boom to it. This thing has almost 23 pounds, just over 10 kilograms of Composition B, which is TNT and RDX. Yeah, that's a lot of boom. It is a lot of boom. And if you have ever seen anybody removing anti-tank mine, you get the impression that yes, it would tear a tank up pretty well. Yeah. And you want to take another break and then come back and talk about removing some of these things?

Yeah, let's do it. Okay. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. In each episode, we'll rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Welcome to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I wish you... Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Okay, Chuck, so we talked about what's out there and how many are out there. There are people who are dedicated to removing these things. Yes. As a matter of fact, a group formed an international landmine treaty, band treaty, to basically outlaw those things. And there's 164 countries that have signed it. Most of those, I think, 163 have ratified it. And it basically says that we are not going to produce, stockpile, or transfer any mines, any longer, landmines of any kind, any longer. And we're also going to work toward removing old mines and getting rid of them and then financially and medically assisting the survivors or victims of landmines, casualties of landmines.

Specifically, I think civilians who have been blown up by a landmine. And I think they formed in 1995 and within two years they won the Nobel Prize. Yeah, this is an interesting one because the U.S. and Cuba are one of the only two western countries that have not signed on to this. However, the U.S. is also probably the leading country in the world at pouring money into landmine eradication and support. And for their money, they say, listen, I mean, this is what they say at least. They say the only reason that we're not signing on to this is because of the demilitarized zone between North Korea and South Korea. We need that line of defense so North Korea cannot march in there and attack our ally in South Korea. I don't know whether to believe that.

I know the Obama administration came close to signing on, but he never did. It's virtually guaranteed that the Trump administration won't sign on. There's like a zero percent chance of that happening. But the more and more nuclear capable North Korea gets, the less and less reason that you're going to have to have those landmines scattered throughout the DMZ there. So I don't know whether to buy that or not, but they say that that's the reason. And to their credit, they do spend more money and time and efforts trying to clear the world of landmines in any other country, I think. Yeah, they're definitely a leader in reality, but they're still criticized or the U.S. is still criticized for not having signed on to this treaty. Because there's a lot of other states that may actually follow suit if the United States did.

They're in the company of Iran, Israel, Azerbaijan, a lot of Russia, a lot of former Soviet satellite states, China. There's some pretty big players in as far as global militaries go, right? Or militaries around the world go. So if the United States did that, it would exert some pressure on some of the other ones. But like you said, the Trump administration is not huge on international treaties. And this, I think it was the New York Times editorial board that said there's a zero percent chance of assigning it, right? But we are still one of the leaders in actually removing mines. The United States military stockpile is pretty small.

I think it's around three million right now. And as far as I know, we're not deploying anymore. And we really haven't since, I think, 2003 in Iraq when we invaded Iraq. That was the last time we laid landmines as far as the U.S. goes, right? Yeah, and three million sounds like a lot, and it is, but compared to like a Russia which has like between 20 and 30 million, it's not as many. So one thing that, like, I thought that was pretty odd, too. I was like, the DMZ, that's what, that's why we're not signing on to this landmine treaty. That's weird.

And then I started looking up cluster bombs. And there's another treaty, kind of like a corollary treaty to the International Landmine Treaty to ban cluster bombs as well. And that has some, it's much newer, but it has, I think, a pretty decent amount, like 120 countries already signed on to it. But with cluster bombs, I was looking up the Pentagon's reasoning for not signing on to this treaty. So back in, I think, 2008, the Bush administration said the U.S. will sign this cluster bomb ban treaty if we have not developed cluster bombs that have a failure rate of 1% or less. Meaning only one out of every hundred of those little bomblets that comes out of the cluster bomb cylinder doesn't explode upon contact, right? And apparently, just within the last few days, the Pentagon said, well, the deadline's 2019. We haven't developed cluster bombs that have that low of a failure rate.

So we're just going to ignore that and keep using cluster bombs. And the report said it's because they want to reserve the right to use them in case of a ground war with North Korea. So I'm like, what do you guys know that we don't know? Like, is it really that eminent, a ground war with Korea, that we need to reserve the right to use cluster bombs in landmines still? Are we that close to the knife's edge? And if so, then the whole nuclear thing makes me even more nervous than it did before. Yeah. It should all make you nervous. It does. So I'll tell you one thing that makes everybody nervous, Chuck, and that's being out in a minefield removing landmines. Yeah. So this has many, many problems to root out.

First of all, finding the mines, like you said earlier, they're not marked. They don't say, here's a minefield and here's where they're all located. So finding these things, millions of them around the world is really tough. And even when you find the minefield, it's tough. So like the first thing is to find the minefield, then it depends on how you do it. And we're going to talk about all the ways that they're trying to do this. Some of which are very rudimentary, which the very first one you can do is called probing the ground. That means walking around with a stick or a bayonet and poking around.

Lightly. Very lightly. Oh, so lightly. Yeah. I get the feeling that this is, I'm sure it's still done in some parts of the world, but it's certainly not one of the more advanced operations any longer. I get the impression that that's what soldiers do when they're like, nope, we can't go around. We have to keep going straight. Probably so.

That that's what, because they use sticks or bayonets typically and they're trained to kind of do it very, very lightly. So I think that's who does that. All right. So you've also got trained dogs. This is horrifying when you think about a dog getting blown up, but they are trained to sniff out these explosive vapors in the bomb ingredients. I also saw rats have been trained by a company called Apopo. Oh yeah, rats and bees. Oh, I didn't see bees. That makes sense though. Yeah. Bees are trained and that wasn't one of the things you sent over to me.

The bees were? How did I miss that? I don't know because you're all about bees. I love bees. Yeah. The bees apparently said the hard part is not training them to find these things, but tracking them once you release the honey bees. Makes sense. So they're trained with sugar coated TNT and then of course they can find the, that's how they find the TNT, but it has no sugar on it. Right. One of the, I guess, I think, so that to me is a big step up from poking with a stick.

Yes. In between those two is using a good old fashioned metal detector. Yeah. It works, but the problem is twofold. One, metal detectors send a signal back for anything that has any metal to it whatsoever. So you get a hit and you are very like gingerly searching the area to see if there is a mine there. Nope, it's an old Roman coin or it's like an old butterfly top to a Miller beer can. It's anything metal, right? So that's one part of the problem.

And then the second part of the problem is that you actually may miss metal because some types of the 350 different varieties of mines use very little metal. Some of them are almost entirely plastic. Yeah. So not only are you picking up stuff that's not a landmine and then wasting time seeing if it is a landmine, you're actually potentially missing landmines as well. Yeah. So that's a problem because that was my first thought is like, I remember when I was a kid, my dad was all over that metal detector on the beach. Oh yeah. So just get a lot of my dads out there or dudes like my dad and just tell them to go wild.

Yeah, they can coordinate over CB while they're driving their jeeps out to the minefield. I totally would. Some more promising newer technology specifically being developed at Ohio State University and I think they're actually using this now is called GPR or Ground Penetrating Radar. This uses magic leprechauns inside a machine. Who exert no pressure. To tell you where these things are underground. Yeah, it's actually, it's pretty sweet. It's like a metal detector ground penetrating radar combo.

So the ground penetrating radar can show you if it's an anomaly, but then the radar also interacts with explosives and the electrical properties unique to explosives. So it can actually tell you there's something weird down there and the amazing Kreskin here thinks that it's TNT. Yeah. And this is crazy. Once they find these landmines with the GPR device, it shoots chemical agents, two of them into the ground that actually solidifies the triggering mechanism. At first, along with the soil and then a second chemical agent that solidifies all of the mine in the soil so they can just be scooped up. Right. Well, I don't understand that.

What is it? I don't know. I don't know. Is it cement? I don't know if it was proprietary or what, but I couldn't find what those chemical agents were, but they sound pretty awesome. Yeah. And not something you want to like get on your hands. No.

You know? No. Wash hands, flush eyes. So that's actually, that's like you said, that's in use. That's a huge innovation because it shows you, you get like the hits that you get from a metal detector, but you also don't get the misses. And then it also shows you if something is roughly the size or shape of a landmine so you don't waste time digging up old butterfly bottle caps, right? Yeah. I like it.

That's my favorite. And it came from the Ohio State University, this article gets it wrong, it calls it scientists at Ohio State University. The shame. Yeah. My favorite are these, these big heavy machines. So if you, and I didn't ever think I was a kid who liked, I never played with like Tonka trucks and stuff much. I was obviously, you know, we talked about the evil Knievel and stuff like that model cars. Yeah.

But for some reason as an adult, heavy machinery really, really turns my crank. So go look up in your Google images, the Panther and the Ardvark tank or mine removal machines and just delight in these huge things that are part of Bobcat part Humvee. And they're, they're just so rudimentary, like literally one of them, the Ardvark has these, it has like a spinning thing that sits out in front of it that just spins chains and like whips the ground with big metal chains. I mean, it's so brain dead and rudimentary that said, let's just get a big heavy thing out there that smashes the ground with chains. And the point is to just set off a landmine encounters, right? So it's like, and the Ardvark just takes it. Huge anti-tank mines just blown up right underneath these chains that are whipping up the ground, the front part of the Ardvark. And I saw a video of a guy in one who I guess hit a mine and they show him in the cab and he barely is jostled by the explosion.

This huge explosion that they show like 80 times because it's, I think on the military channel or something like that. And it's like, why don't you just make everything out of whatever you're making the Ardvark out of? Why isn't the tank made of that? It's that same joke is like, you know, why don't you make the whole plane out of the black box if the black box is the one thing that's always found. But it's true. And I'm sure I think with MRAPs like mine, I can't remember what that stands for, but you remember the IEDs that were killing so many American soldiers at the beginning of the Iraq war. And then they figured out a way to armor plate Humvees so that they were kind of impervious to IEDs. I think it's basically the same technology on the Ardvark.

Yeah. So that one, like you said, has a dude in it. Then there's the Panther and that is a 60 ton remote controlled thing. So this has somebody on the side with a joystick operating this thing through a minefield. This has big metal rollers to set off these set off the mines. And then there are regular tanks that you can sort of retrofit with a plow that sort of plows along and gently pushes these mines out of the dirt in the path. Then someone can come along and I don't know, I guess collect them in a pink basket. Yeah.

There's another machine called a berm processing assembly that just goes down through these mounds of dirt that have mines in them and shakes the mines out of the dirt and sets them off to the side so they're exposed so they can be picked up and detonated. We mentioned bees and rats and dogs. Very sadly, elephants can sniff out mines. They're pretty good at it. They don't use elephants to do this because that just doesn't make much sense. But they have killed and injured a bunch of elephants. Yeah. My favorite new machine that they're using, and this makes total sense, are drones.

The mine K-FON drone, K-A-F-O-N. This is a drone basically that was developed by a guy named Masoud Hassani. And it's a drone that does the work of the human. It's a drone with metal detectors attached to it. So it just flies really low over the ground and detects these landmines with nobody walking on the ground or no machine on the ground. Right. Makes total sense. It really does. It's great. And then what does it do? Is it mark it on like GPS or something like that?

Yeah. It marks it on a GPS and then can even come back and place a detonator, drop a detonator on it, basically fly away and it explodes itself. That's pretty awesome. And they're only like five grand compared to robots and stuff like that can go from 80 to half a million bucks. Yeah. The Aardvark looks extremely expensive, for sure. I imagine it's not cheap. So we talked about the International Ban Treaty, the campaign to ban landmines that won the Nobel Prize in 1997. Their work actually had a huge impact. And I think 1999, there was a peak of casualties worldwide from landmines of 9,228. By 2013, they'd gotten that down to 3,450.

And it really looked like the work of this group and like the international treaty that it created and all these countries signed was having a real genuine impact on landmine casualties. Apparently the tide turned in 2016 and the numbers have started to go back up. The low was 3,450 in 2013. In 2016, it was up to 8,605, which has got to be really demoralizing. Yeah. And I think you said very early on a lot of this is because of what's going on at Yemen and Syria right now, right? Right. So sad. I saw also, remember I said Egypt has a lot of old mines from World War II. Apparently ISIS is taking to digging those up and replanting them. And we should say landmines and IEDs are virtually one in the same. It's just landmines are mass produced, whereas IEDs are made by insurgent bomb makers.

They're usually not commercially produced. Right. There's no contract that ISIS has out with somebody. Did you ever see Hurt Locker? The Hurt Locker? No, I haven't seen that one. Man, that's a good movie. Talk about tents. I can imagine. I mean, that's what they do, right? They go and remove mines, right? Or bombs? Yeah. IEDs, bombs, anything like any unexploded thing. Jeremy Renner's in it and these, it's just amazing.

Like they just wear these like big heavy suits basically, like anti blast suits and then work very carefully and slowly. Yeah. Oh, one other thing, Chuck. Yes. Princess Diana. Yeah, we have to mention her. I mean, some of the, probably her most important work she did as Princess was in the final years of her life working to try and raise awareness to eradicate landmines around the world. Just amazing stuff. And she wasn't, she took a lot of heat sometimes from within her own country. Yeah.

And sometimes they didn't, they thought she was just not being super helpful. Some people would bag on her for just doing like photo ops and stuff like that. But by all accounts, she was, I mean, she did what she could. She had a lot of things that happened off the cameras. She would go and visit these hospitals where these children were affected. It was a humanitarian effort to really kind of shine a light and raise awareness more than like, hey, I can create policy. Right. As the princess, she knew she couldn't do that. Right. But she did a lot of great work to raise awareness and when she, when she died, it was a very sad day and they, obviously for many reasons, but Nobel Prize winning winner Jody Williams said the death of Princess Diana meant that the anti landmine activists lost their most visible advocate.

So that was very sad. She did great work. Yeah. I mean, it takes a certain kind of person to say, well, the global spotlight is on me right now. I'm going to walk over here to this under, under, under served population of people who are being blown up by leftover landmines that people don't really know about. And now the spotlight's on them. Yeah. That says quite a bit about somebody to do that. Pretty amazing. So you got anything else? I got nothing else.

If you want to know more about landmines, you can type those words in the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said landmine, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this brother and sister listening pair. I was never a good headline writer on newspaper staff, by the way. It's tough. Hey guys, finally feel like I have something to write about. My brother introduced me to your show over Christmas just this year and I've been slowly working my way through from D.V. Cooper to X murders to Winchester mystery house to jellyfish. I've loved them all.

So first of all, thanks to my brother, Michael, who lives in Savannah for the introduction. He actually plays a role in why I'm writing. I just finished listening to the vampire panics episode. And at the beginning you talked about coming upon dead bodies. Well, growing up a dead body was discovered in the ravine behind our neighbor's house. They had to pull it up the hill. So my brother and I got out our spy gear and took pictures of the policemen and paramedics pulling up the dead body and carrying it away. It's a lot of excitement and at the time we didn't really think about it.

But when the photos came back developed, it really finally hit home how creepy it was that we had seen a dead body. Anyway, thanks for providing interesting and entertaining episodes. I teach kindergarten. It's funny she talked about being drawn to the darker episodes as a kindergarten teacher. She says sometimes you just need a break from boogers and Paw Patrol. And here grownups talk about cool and interesting stuff. That is from Melissa. She's going to be at our DC show and Michael and Savannah is upset because he can't go.

Yeah. Well, he should fly up to DC. There are such things as airplanes. It's greater chances of that happening than us going to Savannah for a show. And there is always room for boogers, Melissa. Don't be mistaken. There is room for boogers by Josh Clark. Thanks for writing in. Hey to you both. And thanks for listening.

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